Pages

13 April 2012

E. O. Wilson's Advice to Young Students

The Atlantic has a nice little piece on what E. O. Wilson thinks young scientists should do. I especially like this proposal:

Step away from the blackboard.
"In science and all its applications, what is crucial is not technical ability, but it is imagination -- the ability to form concepts with images of entities and processes pictured by intuition. I found out that advances in science rarely come upstream, from an ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical propositions and equations. They are instead the product of downstream imagination leading to hard work, during which mathematical reasoning may or may not prove to be relevant."